Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Killing it

This had been my fix last weekend- Seymour Duncan's Killing Floor (KF).

It's a high gain boost pedal, a single knob affair with a 3-way tone switch. I'm the type who doesn't glorify a boost pedal too much because they tend to be 1) A mere volume bumping device 2) Contain sparse drive capacity, appealing more to clean players. So the KF does both- it bumps up your volume as the dial turns clockwise & gives you more gain along the way.

Clean channel

I played it into a clean setting first, as clean as it gets, with single coil pickups. The KF made things louder incrementally & adding dirt from a subtle drive type to a generous distortion voicing when maxed out. We are still in rock territory, nothing too ferocious but at the pedal's extreme end, it can outperform a BOSS DS-1 quite easily.

Dirty channel

So now the pedal acts as a supplementary drive device very much like stacking two dirt pedals in a simultaneous application. The drive at the amp end was set to its 50% mark while the pedal itself was initially set at 25%, 50%, 75% & finally, in its full glory. You get a TS-like drive effect in the lower register, things get heated up at the half-way point. Also happening at this stage; ease of harmonics trigger. At 75% performance, the angry distortion voicing was heard & upon maxing out, the overall drive push was believably twice the intensity- yes, it's that intense.

Tone switch

The 3 tone voicings were more audible in the clean channel. The cut & boost were nothing drastic but they were there to be heard. However, the EQ changes were not that apparent once the pedal was made to push an already driven signal. From my end of the observations, I needed to make the amp louder for those changes to be heard, unlike the clean channel performance. The tone switch is there to make a difference, forgive its shortcomings if those differences were underwhelming at some applications. This is a boost pedal after all, not an EQ stalwart.

Conclusion

The KF was beyond my personal expectations. I was at the store ready to grab something else (that something else will be disclosed soon) but that one let me down & I had a friend there who could fully relate to my concerns when it was tested out. Many of us wouldn't fork out too much money for a boost unit because it's largely a one-trick pony but some one trick ponies are specialists upon discovery. Another likeable Seymour Duncan pedal worth every cent of my money- thumbs up.